This invention relates to nut based food products and to a process for preparing such food products. More particularly, the present invention relates to a snack made from nut meals and a process for preparing same.
Snack items have assumed a prominent role in the American diet, especially peanuts or other types of nuts which are consumed in large quantities and are nutritious due to their high protein content. It would be desirable to produce a nut-based snack product in either sheeted form or in the form of snack "sticks" having visually-apparent pieces of nuts and which retain the characteristic nut flavor found in roasted nuts such as peanuts, but which has a crunchy/chewy, pliable texture.
It would also be desirable to prepare a nut-based snack product which is high in protein and low in fat relative to other similar snack items such as corn chips or potato chips or sticks. Such a product has not yet appeared on the market. Attempts have been made in the prior art to prepare such a snack item but have failed for various reasons.
The art provides numerous attempts to produce snack products with a high nut content. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 2,685,519 to Moore discloses a peanut product in chip form which has been prepared from raw peanuts. According to this patent, raw nuts are ground to a coarse meal, to which is added water to form a dough. The dough is sheeted and cut into conveniently sized pieces which are baked or fried and then salted to produce the finished product. Moore teaches away from using too fine a meal with full fat peanuts since the finished product has an undesirable peanut butter flavor as compared with a roasted peanut flavor.
Furthermore, this patent describes the use of only raw, full-fat nuts which are formed into a dough without an intermediate step of roasting the nuts, thus resulting in incomplete development of the characteristic roasted flavor of the nuts since the only flavor development takes place in the final baking or frying step. Because the product is made with full fat peanuts, it has a high fat content which results in an undesirable level of calories. The high fat content also results in an unacceptable chewy texture more reminiscent of peanut butter.
Another attempt is described in Canadian Patent 861,445 to Brown et al., which discloses a chip-type food product prepared from ground full-fat nuts by forming a high moisture slurry containing crushed nuts having a maximum particle size of 1/8 inches and not more than 20% by weight fines (i.e., particles passing through a 60 mesh ASTM) with an edible binder. The slurry is then cast onto a conveyor belt and passed through a first drying oven at a temperature of 160.degree. F. for a residence time of 20 minutes. The partially dried sheet is peeled from the belt and cut into chip-size pieces which are passed through a second drying oven at a temperature of 160.degree. F. for 90 minutes to reduce the moisture to less than 2% by weight.
The Brown et al. patent does teach the desirability of using coarse pieces of nuts for their ability to enhance the flavor of the chip and the use of binding ingredients to hold the product together and help produce a crisp texture. Brown et al. also limits the amount of fines to less than 20% of the nuts used. However, the method used in this patent teaches away from frying, but rather, employs an extensive and complex multi-phased drying procedure. The thick slurry formed is not of a dough consistency and, therefore, cannot be worked and sheeted or effectively extruded. Furthermore, the product takes over two hours to cook with an intermediate stage in which the semi-dried sheet is shaped, thus making the process unnecessarily costly and cumbersome.
Japanese Kokai No. 60-94060, assigned to House Shokuhin Kogy, relates to a chip-type snack made with defatted and ground nuts in which powdered cereal and/or starch are mixed with seasonings and spices and crushed nuts to form a dough which is sheet and fried. The patent avoids the problems associated with binding coarse pieces of peanut by using only 3-10% ground nuts which are easily held together by a much greater amount of starch based cereal type products. Hence, the resulting chip contains only a minor proportion of peanuts.
Attempts have been made to study the effects that roasting and toasting have on production of chip-type snacks, but only peanut flours were examined and the products produced all had poor texture and flavor. See McWatters, et al., "Influence Of Defatting and Toasting On Binding And Processing Characteristics Of Peanut Flours Utilized In Snack-Type Peanut Chips", The Journal of Food Science, Vol. 45 at page 831 (1980).
Canadian Patent 866,150 to Stevenson et al. teaches the use of defatted peanuts in preparing a chip-type snack product. The nuts are roasted to achieve a flavor characteristic of roasted peanuts and then blanched before being treated to reduce the oil content to within the range of 20 to 30 percent. The resulting nuts are then ground to form a meal having a particle size within the range of 8 mesh to 200 mesh, U.S. equivalent screen. A dough is prepared by mixing the meal with water, an emulsifying agent and a binding agent. The dough is rolled into a thin sheet, cut into chips, and the chips are deep fried for a short period.
It has now been found that snacks derived from defatted and ground nuts having markedly improved texture, appearance, and flavor, can be prepared by the process described hereinbelow.